Female Power: Interview with the lady bosses.

Hey folks! Today we have Jackie and Yanni from LadyBoss to share with us FEMALE POWER and their passion towards entrepreneurship. LadyBoss.Asia is the one-stop portal for female ladies from all walks of life.

From fashion, networking to life-hack topics for ladies–you name it, they have it! Get inspired, be empowered!

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IKIGUIDE: Hi Jackie and Yanni! Can you tell us more about yourselves?Jackie: I am from the digital marketing background have spent more than 10 years in this area. Over the years, I have also worked on several e-commerce businesses and picked up the skills in web development as well. Other than LadyBoss, I am also the founder of Amber Creative, a digital marketing and web development agency.

Yanni: I am a freelance journalist with a total of 14 years of writing-editing experience at several magazine publishing companies including SPH Magazines, Edipresse (Tatler mags), CR Media and Heart Media. I was formerly the Editor of titles such as Tatler Traveller, Tatler Weddings, and Tatler Jewels & Time. For the past 2 years, I have been working freelance, and was the Contract Editor/Project Director for World of Watches: Jewellery, an annual luxury watch and jewellery magazine.

IKIGUIDE: Can you tell us more about the Lady Boss portal? What inspired the concept?LadyBoss: LadyBoss is a digital magazine and resource portal for female leaders. When we started networking among female business groups, we noticed that most of them were quite small and that there wasn’t a very strong community online. For women who wanted to start a business, there wasn’t a very strong comprehensive portal where they could go to for information. For example, common questions like what kind of company structures should they consider, how to do hire interns, create websites etc. were missing.
Later, as we did more research, we realised that there isn’t a leading magazine like Forbes Woman in Asia, so we wanted LadyBoss to effectively become that as well.

IKIGUIDE: What do you think are the main challenges when a lady wants to set up a company?LadyBoss: For one, our society is still quite traditional and there are still expectations that a woman should rely on her husband and focus on her family. In some cases, she may even face strong opposition from her own family members, I have friends who’s parents were very much against them starting their business. While dual income households are more common nowadays, there is still this expectation that a woman will be handicapped by maternity and will be the one to sacrifice career for opportunity.

There are also various male dominant industries which women may find it more difficult to break into, for example, information technology, construction and engineering. It is difficult, at least initially for people to take a female technology leader seriously until they have proven themselves. There is always this perception that the Chief Technology Officer role would be helmed by a male. Actually, female engineers can be just as strong and talented as their male counterparts, unfortunately they still face gender discrimination. In fact, many people were surprised that we developed LadyBoss website internally given that we are a all female team!

IKIGUIDE: What is your vision for women in Asia when it comes to becoming their own bosses, or higher level executives?LadyBoss: We believe that Asian women can become very successful just like our Western counterparts despite our more traditional culture. We wish to have more stories of self-made Asian women at the top and hopefully inspire more young ladies to push the boundaries rather than just settle for a lesser role.

IKIGUIDE: Your website is an interesting curation of work hacks, inspiring stories and fashion. Can you tell us more about some of the offline activities that are planned in future?LadyBoss: We are planning to run summit or networking style events where we can bring together the top female leaders to share about their experiences as well as knowledge. We also intend to run information/training courses to educate and help both budding and new female entrepreneurs on their journey.

IKIGUIDE: On a parting note, do you have any words of wisdom to share with our future lady bosses?LadyBoss: Starting and maintaining business or organization requires you to have a very strong mission and vision. You have to want it hard enough, believe it hard enough that you will do whatever it takes to achieve it. That’s the only way you can inspire your team to follow you and rough it out together.